The Commute with Maureen Paley

Journey: Shoreditch to Bethnal Green
Mode of transport: on foot

“It’s quite special, in a certain extended, chosen family way, to find myself in this location,” Maureen Paley says, as she shows me around her project space, Studio M, at the Rochelle School in Shoreditch.

“I was around here and knew James Moores, who owns the place, in the seventies when I was, hanging out on the scene,” she says. Studio M, opened in 2020, is the latest addition to her stable of galleries. Morena di Luna – she’s a moon obsessive – opened in 2017 in Hove, where she lives some of the time; her main space, in Bethnal Green, is where we’re commuting to today, and is near her London home.

“Having Shoreditch added to the constellation of spaces kind of made us feel closer to town,” she laughs. “And it also means we’re close to Kate MacGarry, Emalin, and lots of different restaurants and places – we like connecting with this.”

The space is empty right now, dominated by its vast, tall window, but it will be transformed in time for Frieze by the artist Seb Patane, who creates spare tableaux of drawings, adapted found imagery and objects, often with sound and performance.

Paley’s been going to Margot Henderson and Melanie Arnold’s Rochelle Canteen, which opened in 2004 – quite early to be Going East for the restaurant scene, but nowhere near as pioneering as Paley – “for years,” she tells me, as we descend the metal stairs to the bucolic garden.

“I would take artists, traditionally, just before their show opened. Now, weirdly, I’m doing it less, but I would take them for lunch here, and I would use it for dinners. This is my favourite.”

As we emerge onto Arnold Circus, she admits that though she occasionally does this walk (always on the phone), possibly with a drop-in to hip homewares store Labour and Wait a few doors down if she’s forgotten to buy a present (“and this is always my way”), sometimes she takes an Uber, which must take all of eight minutes.

On a day like today though, a crisp and sunny mid-September belter (and Paley’s birthday, though, she tells me, “I’m not big on birthdays; I like 364 unbirthdays, like in Alice in Wonderland”), it’s rude not to step outside.

She’s been here since 1977 when she first moved to London from New York. “I thought I was going to be in the East End for maybe a year or two, but I felt so drawn to it.” It was Gilbert and George that inspired her, when she worked out, via stamps on their artwork, that their address was in Fournier Street, and went to have a look.

“Shoreditch in those days didn’t have infrastructure at all,” she says. “There had been light industrial spaces and things that were happening in terms of communities in the past. But it’s taken 40-something years to see the growth we’re looking at now.”

She stops to show me Jolene, a coffee shop and bakery on the corner of Redchurch Street and Club Row, part-owned by the splendidly named Jeremie Cornetto-Liegenheim, also behind Westerns Laundry in Highbury. “He’s very adventurous and everything that he’s doing is sustainable,” she says. “We do all our Christmas dinners at Westerns Laundry, so we feel very connected.”

Continuing on our way, we head down Brick Lane, where she ignores the bagel joints to point out a Japanese tea shop, Katsute 100 (“They do the best matchas ever”) and Dark Sugars, a chocolate shop that seems to be doing a roaring trade. When she first arrived, though, “lots of people were very reluctant, they wouldn’t even come here.”

She was hoping for a loft gallery space (“that wasn’t to be”), but through Acme Housing Association, she found a derelict house, which eventually became her first space, Interim Art. “It was my intention initially to convert it to be some sort of studio space, which then came to be an open studio, which then came to be a gallery.”

There was no ‘art scene’ as such, “but there were things that connected to what I was doing. I always went to the Whitechapel Gallery. At the time Nick Serota was running it, it was really quite special. You wouldn’t miss an opening. And then there was Matt’s Gallery, he was around the corner from where my first gallery was, so again, that connected a number of people who were very overlapping in the community.”

In 1986, Chisenhale opened, “but commercial galleries, which I’m now surrounded by, no. And in fact, it was questioned as to why I would even find that location of interest.”

She laughingly tells me about one person, whom she won’t name but describes as “puce in the face”, who told her in 1987 that “’you should get out of the East End. Nothing is going to come of this. It is a total mistake’. They were sort of doing this gaslighting, really intense alpha male thing. Like, ‘you’re never going to amount to anything if you stay there’.”

Funny how things turn out, isn’t it? She stuck to her guns, inspired by peers back in New York, who had run galleries on the Lower East Side. “They were opening up things in shop fronts and I loved the energy of what they were doing. I thought I could bring some of this energy back to London.”

By now we’ve turned left onto Cheshire Street, another formerly run-down road now enlivened with establishments in which, should you require it, you can buy a denim jacket adorned with Lana Del Rey’s face. Paley delights in the fact that this part of the world has become “a destination” and I point out that it’s in part down to her.

She wonders whether it was easier for her to make that choice as an outsider. “Though I’m now a British citizen, I think coming from the outside, it meant that I didn’t look at the area with as much…” she pauses. She wants to be polite. “As much, you know, attitude…”

You mean you weren’t looking at it through the lens of class, I say. She looks grateful behind her signature sunglasses.

“Many people said things like, ‘What are you doing? You must be mad’, you know, but I just looked at the actual architecture, and was just liking a certain type of space.” Snobbery isn’t exclusive to Britain though, she concedes. “When I look back at [my time in] New York, trying to get me to go to Brooklyn was really difficult. So I came to understand it on my own terms.”

She points out Repton Boxing Club on the left – she’s not a member, she just likes the building – and continuing into Dunbridge Street, I realise we’re eschewing the green expanse of Weaver’s Fields in favour of the industrial railway arches, where fancy new bakeries (she likes Breidbakers, which does smell heavenly) intermingle with longstanding black cab mechanics. “It’s so atmospheric.”

We’re nearly at Three Colts Lane. She changed the gallery name from Interim Art to her own in 2004 after 20 years, but has been in this bit of Bethnal Green since 1999. She still works with many of the same artists. I wonder what she thinks is key to that long relationship.

“To a great extent I attribute it to a love of art, a love of their art and a depth of understanding about what they do,” she says. “I really feel connected to them and I don’t choose lightly who will be part of the programme.”

It’s a balance of being able to “grow with your artists, to some extent, and also really wish for them to be able to be ambitious. I think of meeting Wolfgang [Tillmans] for the first time, and him growing to the point that he’s at MoMA, and watching the trajectory of that, but not feeling intimidated by it, but feeling actually drawn to it, excited by it.”

She prefers the word ‘gallerist’ to ‘dealer’, with its purely financial connotations. “I’m more curatorial. I’m contextualising, thinking about art, interested in how it’s made, interested in how it’s installed, genuinely connected.” And the difference in the market, from the eighties to now, is hard to overstate.

“Prior to that you were dealing with a totally different landscape. So it’s hard for people who’ve been born later, and who have only seen a boom-type art world, to even conceive of why you’d enter [one] that was not about that.”

At Frieze London, while many of her peers will show solo presentations, Paley will take the opportunity to show the connections between her artists – the likes of Tillmans, Gillian Wearing, Rebecca Warren, Hannah Collins, Hannah Starkey, Max Hooper Schneider, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Chioma Ebinama, Behrang Karimi, Felipe Baeza and a new artist on her roster, Alejandro García Contreras, whose seductive bronze plaques I spot laid out in the storeroom as we arrive at the gallery.

The artist Alexandra Bircken is there, in the midst of installing her show, a collaboration with Herald Street Gallery. She greets Paley with a hug and a birthday greeting. It is graciously received.